hiding the diary
by my cure on ice
Summary: this is the afterlife for the only ones who were ever truly alive. [inuyashasango] [30 shards]


_hiding the diary_  
by Bethany Ten  
legend(s)

Let me tell you a legend about a love story.

You think that, somewhere out there, there's a love that transcends time? There isn't.

There might have been one, though, where the characters involved displayed an express disinterest in reality because they managed to dodge it, except it caught up to them one day and bit them in the ass.

Then there's the fact that everyone overlooks, one way or another; their eyes drift over the horizon like soggy logs floating downstream, and they completely neglect everything aside from that one little thread of darkness, and that little thread becomes a ball of twine, and that ball of twine becomes their pupils that shrink catlike and flee from the sun. That fact is that every story has a sequel, and if the characters aren't dead, then the story isn't really over, is it?

There's a "happily ever after" after the "and they never saw her again"; most people, by then, have already shut the books.

● ● ●

Sango, at the foot of his bed, her calligraphy mussed like the ribbons in her hair, sneaked in and stole some parchment. Sango swore the sunset was nice, so he went out to take a look; the thing was just fragmented globules of orange clinging desperate to the sky, and he was unimpressed, and he walked back in with an obscenity at the edge of his taste buds and she was writing. It never meant a thing, really. He was still a _hanyou_, halved from his still-warm blood to his still-warm love, chained to an existence he was never sure he wanted, and she was still, miraculously, his best friend.

Sunset detached itself completely from him; it was nightfall, suddenly, and he watched the pulse throb in her wrist as she wrote. If he pressed his lips to the slope of her forearm, she would taste like victory and an earthy soap; her skin would cool his filtrum. He would drape himself in her lap and stare at the open sky, and she would let him; she held his hair when he vomited, but he stopped one day, and eventually even he noticed. The bushes smelled like soddy fish, rancid, and she had recently purchased a small cottage at the edge of the village, and they would be moving soon. She would take all her unfinished papers with her and write and write until her palms throbbed with poetry and the blood of his half-kin.

They talked. Much ado about nothing. They sat together and existed quietly, and did little else.

She wrote until her eyes stung and bristled, and she told him that as long as they were alive, there'd be better sunsets to watch, and he knew that believing her is the smartest thing he has ever done.

She poured art from the papery calluses, like patches of leather, on her knuckles. She drew their small cottage at the edge of the village.

She paused one day. "Tell me," she said to his aching smile, "how you imagined it."

● ● ●

"What I imagined," he said, "was nothing like this."

"Is it better?" she asked him, a crate hefted beneath her underarm; she stacked it upon another on the wagon they would be taking to the edge of the village. Their belongings were weightless—except for the stacks of torn leaflets and the inkwells that dyed them.

"Yeah," he said, because she was the hardest to lie to.

"Would you change this?" And she stretched out her hand, her fingertips not-caressing their new home. And she stretched out some more, later, on their lumpy cot, the pinks and reds rippling through her spring kimono, and the pillows smelt of jasmine, and the crates were damp.

And he said yes, in a heartbeat, and he meant no, maybe not, and he meant, _When did I start needing you?_ She nodded—so understanding—and his bloodstained hands joined her bloodstained, ink-stained hands; he never made her promises, because he'd fallen short on all of them (look what happened last time), but she drew them from his skin, his soul, his _heart_, and suddenly he knew what Miroku was saying when he was saying she was worth the wait.

● ● ●

"What I imagined," she confessed to him in the dark, "was something like this."

Because Kagome had given him _hope_ and Miroku had given her a _future_, and "hope" and "future" were painfully dissimilar, and the rift between the two words deepened every morning when he awoke to the whistle of her teakettle and her silhouette, soft curves outlined by sunlight and her _taijiya_ outfit.

"It wasn't me, was it?" he asked her, and it was less of a question and more of a statement, and she suspended her boomerang from the cottage walls.

"It wasn't me, was it," she asked him, and it was more of a question and less of a statement, and he hooked his claws in the skintight fabric on her forearms and drew her closer, and his embrace was tight and bone-crushing, but she was a _taijiya_ and she wouldn't know bone-crushing if it approached stark naked, where the only other who shared his embrace was porcelain-souled, painted and shattered and remade.

"It wasn't," he said, and the skin was soft behind her ears, "but it _is—_"

And white violets did look lovely, on their lawn, at their windowsill, in her hair.

● ● ●

What you imagined: the _miko_ abandons her time for his, and they live happily ever after. The _taijiya_ and the monk marry, and the child has an uncle on his mother's side, and they all know how to hold a sickle. They use it for slaying demons. They use it for farming.

What happened: Kagome's grandfather has a scripture and it talks about what happens when warriors meet on a battlefield and discover their mutual fate. It talks about legends that aren't legends. Kagome's grandfather doesn't like legends that aren't legends; they do nothing to captivate the audience, to accentuate his flair for dramatics.

What happened: the _hanyou_ and the _taijiya_ lived happily ever after.


End file.
